Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

India
SATYAJIT RAY
b. Calcutta, India, 2 May 1921, d. 23 April 1992
The American premiere of Satyajit Ray’s first film, Pather
Panchali (Song of the Little Road), at New York City’s
Museum of Modern Art in 1955 elevated the director into
the pantheon of the world’s great humanist filmmakers,
and he remains India’s most internationally known
director. Although the West viewed Ray’s first films as
essentially Indian, within India Ray’s films clearly
demonstrated his inheritance of the modernist values of
the cosmopolitan Bengali renaissance. Ray was nurtured
within a notably artistic family with close connections to
the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (whose work Ray
would later frequently adapt to film), and as a young man
Ray’s taste in movies was fully international.
As a co-founder in 1947 of the Calcutta Film Society,
he was a keen student of Soviet and European cinema,
especially the Italian neorealist films that directly inspired his
first film and their sequels, Aparajito (The Unvanquished,
1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu,1959).Together
eventually known as the Apu Trilogy, the three films trace
the development of the eponymous central figure from
childhood to maturity and fatherhood as he moves from his
remote village in Bengal to the holy city of Benares and
finally to modern Calcutta, replicating the urbanization of
many modern Indians. The Apu Trilogy featured music
composed and performed by Ravi Shankar, who would
become internationally famous soon thereafter. In the final
film of the trilogy, Ray introduced the actors Soumitra
Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore, who would become regular
members of Ray’s troupe of collaborators, with Chatterjee
eventually appearing in fifteen of Ray’s films.
The remarkable achievement of the Apu trilogy has
sometimes obscured Ray’s other works, many of which,
including Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) and Devi
(The Goddess, 1960), function more as psychological
FILM MUSIC
Along with extremely popular stars, commercial Indian
cinema attracts its massive audience through prominently
featured songs, and elaborate song-sequences, in virtually
all popular films. Although early sound films relied on
singing actors, like the stars K. L. Saigal (1904–1947),
Noorjehan (1926–2000), and Suraiya (1929–2004), the
eventual development of ‘‘playback’’ recording technol-
explorations than realist dramas. Another group, including
Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Shatranj Ke Khilari
(The Chess Players, 1977), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and
the World, 1984), explore the social complexities of the
recent colonial past with meticulous attention to detail.
The full range of Ray’s achievement, which his
international reputation elides, includes documentaries as
well as a series of remarkable and immensely popular
children’s films featuring the comic duo Goopy and
Bagha, characters created by Ray’s grandfather decades
earlier. Ray was also a writer, publisher, and painter.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955), Aparajito (The
Unvanquished, 1956), Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958),
Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), Devi (The Goddess,
1960), Charulata (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Goopy Gyne
Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1968),
Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), Shatranj Ke
Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Ghare-Baire (The Home
and the World, 1984)
FURTHER READING
Cooper, Darius. The Cinema of Satyajit Ray: Between
Tradition and Modernity. Cambridge, UK and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Ganguly, Suranjan. Satyajit Ray: In Search of the Modern.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000.
Ray, Satyajit. Our Films, Their Films: Essays. Bombay: Orient
Longman, 1976; New York: Hyperion Books, 1994.
Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye—The
Biography of a Master Film-Maker. New ed. London and
New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004.
Wood, Robin. The Apu Trilogy. New York: Praeger,
1971.
Corey K. Creekmur
Jyotika Virdi
ogy isolated the voice and body, creating an offscreen star
system of ‘‘playback singers’’ who provide the singing
voices of onscreen stars. Among these, the sisters Lata
Mangeshkar (b. 1929) and Asha Bhosle (b. 1933) have
virtually defined the female singing voice in Hindi cinema
for decades; male playback singers like Mukesh,
Mohammed Rafi (1924–1980), and Kishore Kumar
(1929–1987) were often closely associated with the
18 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM